How can really smart people appear totally incompetent?

11 April 2025 · 4 min

It is often puzzling to encounter organizations run by highly capable and ambitious people… appear dysfunctional.

An example that I like are colleges that claim to provide great learning experience… while providing their students with recycled lectures given by contract lecturers…

I like to tell the tale of this math class I took at the University of Toronto. The esteemed professor would show up with the textbook and a ruler. He would sit down, open the book to the page where the ruler was last left, and read each line of the textbook, slowly moving the ruler down. He would not look at us. He would just read, very slowly, page by page, the content of the textbook. When we showed up to the math department to complain, we were told that the esteemed professor had to teach something, and that they thought best to assign it to our class, since we were in the honours program and could learn on our own.

Recently, the Canadian state broadcaster ran an article about how an otherwise reasonable Canadian university accepted 4000 foreign students, of which only 38 showed up at all, and only 5 stuck with their classes during the first term. It appears that they contributed to a scam which is meant to facilitate immigration.

Apple announced triumphantly its ground-breaking ‘Apple Intelligence’ feature… only to restrict it so much that it becomes irrelevant.

For decades, the leading chip maker in the world was Intel. Intel had such a lead over its competitors that it was believed that attempts at competing against it were useless. Today, few would say that Intel makes the best processors. Its competitors quickly caught up.

Such dysfunctions can be explained by many effects. But I believe that a critical one is a culture of lies. It might be fine to lie to your enemy but once you start lying to yourself, you are inviting trouble. Lies about your objectives are the worst kind.

So you run a college. And you tell prospective students that the quality of their education is your primary concern. But it is a lie. In fact, you want to keep your enrolment at healthy levels and not have too much trouble with your faculty. You do not care very much for what the students learn. In truth, it does not matter because the employers also do not care. You selected bright people and your students managed to fulfil bureaucratic obligations for four years, and that’s good enough.

So what do you do with the esteemed professor who lectures by reading line-by-line in the textbook? Does he lower your enrolment? No. He does not. He is a prestigious researcher who won many awards, so he might contribute to the prestige of your university and even attract students. Trying to get him to learn to teach would mean going against the faculty, which is not in your interest as an administrator. Of course, the students are having a terrible experience, but what does it matter? They will get their grades and they will graduate. And if they tell their story, nobody will care.

Or, as in the example of the Canadian university, you are happy to have enrolled thousands of students. That these students were not actual students does not matter. You look really good on paper, at least for a time. And if you get caught… well, you did your best, didn’t you?

Apple probably did not really want to get into customer AI. They had a really long time to do something with Siri, and they did nothing at all. Apple probably wants to sell iPhones, watches and laptops. They want to look like they are doing something about AI, but they don’t really care.

As for Intel, I don’t have a good theory but I suspect that what happened is the following classic scenario. Intel’s leadership likely touted “we’re still number one” while ignoring warning signs. Nobody cared about long-term technological relevance. They were crushing the competition on the market. It seemed like they had many new things upcoming. It was good enough.

It is not that people running colleges, Intel or Apple are incapable of succeeding. They all succeed on their own terms. They are just not sharing openly what these terms are. And if pushed, they will lie about their goals.

So, how can really smart people appear totally incompetent? Because they are lying to you. What they are openly setting out to achieve is not their real goal.

Given a choice, prefer people who are brutally honest and highly capable. You are much more likely to see them exceed your expectations.